1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and a system for image editing. More particularly, the present invention relates to a feature-based method and system for image editing.
2. Description of Related Art
Currently, image capturing devices such as digital cameras are very popular, and accordingly, the digital image editing technology has drawn more and more attention. Any manipulation on an image can be referred as editing, for example, changing the brightness or sharpness of the entire image, or adjusting the shape or color of a certain object in the image. Common image editing methods are classified into two types, namely, the pixel-based process and the object-based process, which both have their own defects.
The famous image editing software, Adobe Photoshop, and two image compression standards, including JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) and JPEG 2000 are all grouped into the pixel-based image editing. This technology uses separate pixels as the subject for editing, so its disadvantage lies in that, it is difficult to edit an object in an image as a whole.
The object-based image editing has a precondition of completely defining all objects in an image before the operation. Currently, there are two methods for defining the objects. The first one is segmentation, which segments pixels of the image into objects. However, this method is technically immature, and it is difficult for being automated. The second one is to search from pixels according to a preset object model, for example, searching for a part similar to a human face from the pixels according to a face model. The problem of this method lies in that, the types of the preset object models are limited, which cannot cover all the object models applicable for all combinations and variations, and this method is difficult to be used precisely, and difficult to be automated. If the object is hard to be defined automatically, it is difficult to achieve through the way of object-based image editing.
To sum up, currently, no desirable technical scheme is available in manipulating and editing objects in an image.